Everything on the forums has gone to hell. A whole bunch of people have been marked inactive (lettershometoyou, thesacredpath, carocat, universalgeni, lots of randoms), Trent has been demoted, and I’m not sure I believe this can be entirely due to the botched implementation of the new login page, because why would that screw with people’s status on the forums?
(btw, my screenshots look odd because at the point where I was banned I was working on a custom stylesheet to make it look more like a forum and less like a blog. I haven’t bothered to finish it but I haven’t bothered to disable it either.)
I did not have any trouble logging in at all. But then, I was already blocked from forum posting. Make of that what you will.
wordpress™ wank 
sunburntkamel said
it’s certainly bizarre, although they seem to have marked all of their own accounts as inactive as well. it’s feeling stranger and stranger that i _haven’t_ been marked inactive.
that girl again said
Wait, it gets better. Now I can post.
drmike said
I was wondering about that….
Matt Algren said
Somehow in all of this wank is active again. Isn’t that a sign of the apocalypse?
Matt Algren said
Oh sure, beat me to the punch.
I shall use the remainder of this extraneous comment to point out that still nobody’s responded to my question about whether the chat thing is open 24 hours.
drmike said
Maybe the settings got reversed. I note that Sulz got marked as inactive as well.
Got folks doing all those multiple posts without content. I gather there’s no one on duty in the forums to remove them.
engtech said
There’s some sort of login problem happening. Now I can access the forums again — last night it was no go.
Hopefully the 29.5 million will go to hiring some testers, other than the wordpress.com general populace.
🙂
drmike said
tellyworth is marked as inactive.
Wank, what are you doing answering questions?
As an aside, I just discovered there’s no way to renew my domains. There’s no options on the backend and there’s no option in their securepaynet.net Domain Manager
Richard said
If you look through some random threads you find that virtually everyone is inactive.
Everyone is at wordcamp Dallas I suspect.
that girl again said
Can you believe they expect people to pay for upgrades on this service? I hope the VIPs are ringfenced from the beta testing. They certainly pay enough to expect stability.
that girl again said
I will only touch those relating to controversial issues such as global tags and ads, where nobody else can give them a straight answer. Anyway, I’m sure they’ll be gone by tomorrow. (I took some screenshots to remember them by.)
ian in hamburg said
I think the problem must have only been temporary, because I just posted something to the forums before checking this out. I am definitely not inactive, though my latest comment count the past 24 hours is close to zero – I have either stunned everybody silly with the depth of the cynicism overflowing from the post or my inbox is dead…
options said
WordCamp Dallas is going to be held March 29
Richard said
Oops, my bad. I saw something where everyone was heading off for a meeting somewhere and thought it was WordPimp Dallas.
options said
NP
it sounds as though you’re not inclined to attend this event 😉
/wank, sorry for the OT
Mark said
This is NOT a purge or whatever other term.
It was a code change that went wrong and will be fixed. There is nothing malicious here.
that girl again said
Again, I fail to apply Hanlon’s razor. This however is understandable, since the areas of incompetence have a weird tendency to overlap with the areas of malice.
Richard said
@options
Timethief is active again. Will the change from inactive to active hold for those “bad elements” or will they all go back to inactive shortly? Only the shadow knows.
Richard said
@options
Sorry I didn’t finish my thoughts. I was going to say that my appointment calendar is full around the time of wordcamp so no, I won’t be attending.
drmike said
Not withstanding the last few months of course.
Sam Bauers said
An upgrade to the forums was necessary after an upgrade to WordPress.com stopped forum logins from working. This caused some knock on effects that have now been resolved. I’m sorry for the time that the support forum was effectively “read-only”. I’m also sorry that you find this so unacceptable.
WordPress.com has a philosophy of releasing small incremental changes very regularly. Ironically the reason the support forum was so affected was due to the fact that it doesn’t have such a rigorous release schedule, something I hope we can change in the future.
Cat said
Looks like I’ve missed the fun again.. Although I’m still seeing inactive people on the forums, at least on a quick glance.
Stevie said
I was mysteriously logged out today and when I went to log in I saw the god-awful “brand new” log in screen, and I was thinking that they maybe logged everyone out so they can see the new log in screen? I don’t know, but lately the software has been acting erratic. I also cannot edit forum posts because the edit link directs me to the forums homepage or it disappears out of sight, WTF???
I also saw wank in a same thread I posted to today, weren’t you supposed to be “purged” wank? Or did Matt finally stop having his tantrum?
that girl again said
I was accidentally depurged, but am now an unperson again. Woe.
On the contrary, having my posting powers back was perfectly acceptable to me, but it may not have been quite as much fun for the dozens of innocent people who found themselves temporarily branded ‘bad elements’.
Richard said
The story on the forum edit button is that the ones who posted regularly (you know, the unpaid volunteers) were being bad so the privilege was taken away.
Stevie said
Maybe if Matt & Co wrote PROPER software to prevent moderation from maliciously of editing posts then innocent people would be able to edit their OWN postings.
But as I’ve said before, when you rely upon amateur script kiddies to write software for you, these are the outcomes.
drmike said
I’m trying to figure out where any one of state that it’s unacceptable. Being lied to, being insulted, having my handicap made light of, etc. is what I find to be unacceptable and appears to be acceptable to staff of Automattic, especially Matt and Toni. Please kindly do not put words in our mouths.
sunburntkamel said
yes. we definitely need more censorship, especially the mechanical kind, forced by technology. 🙄
Matt Algren said
I’m still not sure why the forums are in such an unsightly, clumsy format. Isn’t there lots of better free forum software to choose from?
(This is a rhetorical question.)
Stevie said
I suppose Autocrattic want everything to be made “custom”. But when amateur script kiddies build a forum (and that’s bbpress) it’s always going to be limited and somewhat lousy for practical use. I suggest otherwise in forum software.